I loved, loved, loved this book! A teenage French girl narrating her and her family's stories. It's about family dynamics, it's about longing for a country that's lost to you forever, it's about the agonies of adolescence in a particular place and time, about how loved ones communicate -- or more often don't. I didn't particularly care for Messud's "The Emporer's Children," but this one is excellent. Now that I think of it, both books dealt with domineering patriarchal figures.

A dense well-written book about the effects of family history on one's life and our need to create stories about our families and ourselves.

Sagesse LaBasse is a teenage girl growing up in comfortable wealth in southern France. Her family, French Algerian emigrants, use family stories to offer a sense of permanance and security in the midst of war, emigrations, crises. The story begins with the grandfather in colonial Algeria, shows in stunning detail the disorder of the last days of French rule in Algeria, follows him to France where he lives as an exile, a stranger in his own country. The story continues to follow the next two generations as they attempt to maintain stability in a precarious world.

The writing is beautiful: "Our lives altered again, like a kaleidoscope turned with the gentle twist of a divine hand." "The abiding question, too, was this .... Is our ending inscribed in our beginning -- and, if so, in whose beginning? ... Was my father locked in a destiny, visible or invisible, from which no turning could have spared him?" But good writing is not enough, or maybe this writing was just too dense and introspective for me. I found the last quarter of the book tedious, and I was tempted to skim what in the end seemed like just a long droning monologue. Even with family conflicts, scandals, suicide, the novel was too dry and - yes - tedious.

The prose in this book is beautiful at many points, and there are some interesting twists in the plot, but it's one of the few books I just couldn't read through. I found myself too confused (how old is the protagonist? why is she so unhappy?). There were times I wasn't sure if we were in Algeria or in France. I finally skipped most of the book and read the end, mostly because I was sure that I must have missed something amazing in this book that everyone else could see. I didn't find the end satisfying at all. I wanted to like this book but just couldn't.

Exceptionally well-written; richly describes contemporary Algerian history from the perspective of priveledged French teenager. Messud is impressive.

[4+] What a superb, multi-layered, complex, atypical, coming-of-age story! Sagresse is 14 at the start of the novel and struggling to come to terms with her feelings of displacement amidst the burden of a family weighed down by its history and secrets. At times, Messud's psychological and philosophical insights are overpowering - but being in the hands of such a smart, assured writer is worth it. I adore Messuds' writing. I listened to the audio, narrated beautifully by Saskia Maarleveld.

Family history is never singular. Messud captures the multiplicities of family narrative. What are our defining moments? How do we construct and rewrite what is and was important in our lives – and those of our ancestors? Partially a coming of age story for a young French girl of Pied Noir heritage and part an ode to lost homelands. I love novels with this kind of strikingly beautiful prose, that require rereading a sentence four times, but still plow through the 400 pages in a few days. Her timeline lingers and returns to seemingly trivial parts that are important and glazes over others as do our memories.

Beautifully written and masterfully constructed, this coming of age story is told from the perspective of the main character as a young woman looking back on her childhood. Her French family owns a luxury hotel on the Mediterranean but had lived in Algeria during the colonial uprising in the 60s, escaping only when France loses control of the colony. The main character struggles to know herself, to fit in (her mother is American, her father French)- never sure of her place or identity. But the ending seems too much an easy way out. She never learns to be honest with herself or about herself. The story goes back and forth in time and location, mostly moves along quickly and was one I couldn't wait to get back to. The ending does not fail, but I felt sorry for the main character's failure to embrace her identity and her truth.

Claire Messud is a gifted writer and every line is crafted. I found myself unable to put this book down because of her beautiful prose, but the storyline utself was mediocre. I found the same kind of letdown at the end of this novel as her previous novel, "The Emperor's Children". What was it really all about in the end and what larger truth about life was revealed? I'm still not sure, but would probably still read her next book to see if her stories can grow as compelling as her writing.

This was a lot a lot like “The Lying Life of Adults” (which is a lot a lot like “My Brilliant Friend”), and also like "Atonement," with a bit of "Children's Bible" wafting in here and there (although noticeably more European than American). It's a book about loss and disillusionment and coming to terms with unfortunate realities—histories, presents, and futures. If you like watching angst develop in real time in teenaged girls trying to figure out how the world works, this is one to try. It's complicated and imperfect and uncomfortable, and it contains more questions than answers, and I'm not sure if I *liked* it as much as I appreciated it (although I appreciated it a whole lot; the author has a fascinating mind), and I can't think of any specific person I'd recommend this to, but maybe you'll like or appreciate it too?

Here are some killer vocab words, followed by some quotes that capture the big-smallness/close-vastness of the book's arc:

cicatrise: to heal by scar formation
bibelots: small, decorative ornaments or trinkets
pullulate: multiply or spread prolifically or rapidly, or to be full of or teeming with
chevelure: head of hair
soughing: making a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound, as of the sea
shantung: a type of silk weave fabric
estival: belonging to or appearing in summer
tentacular: equipped with tentacles
medusa (adj): like a free-swimming sexual form of a coelenterate such as a jellyfish
marabout: a shrine marking the burial place of a Muslim holy man or hermit
nacreous: having a play of lustrous rainbow colors, like mother-of-pearl
flense: to slice the skin or fat from a carcass
abscission: the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit

"But fourteen is not an age a which you ask outright for answers: not yet. Those in-between years are a haze of second-guessing and dialogues entirely of the mind. The possibility of human proximity seems greater than it ever will again, trailing still the unreflective clouds of childhood, the intimate, unsentenced dialogue of laughter or of games. Children do not have the words to ask and so do not imagine asking; not asking and not imagining, they eradicate distance: they take for granted that everything, someday, will be understood. // Adolescence, then is a curious station on the route from ignorant communion to our ultimate isolation, the place where words and silences reveal themselves to be meaningful and yet where, too young to acknowledge that we cannot gauge their meaning, we imagine it for ourselves and behave. Only with the passage of years, wearied, do we resort to asking. With the inadequacy of asking and the inadequacy of replies comes the realization that what we thought we understood bears no relation to what exists, the way, seeing the film of a book we have read, we are aghast to find the heroine a strapping blonde when we had pictured her all these years a small brunette; and her house, which we envisaged so clearly and quaintly on the edge of a purple moor, a vast, unfamiliar pile of rubble with all its rooms out of order."

"When you are fourteen—or fifteen, or sixteen—none of it on such a morning after seems at all possible....Blithley to say it seems unreal is not to capture the complexity of the state: what has come before hovers like a dream, and what is yet to come is unimaginable. The future stretches far to the horizon, but between now and it a chasm has opened, for which no possible bridge can be seen. This was my second encounter with such rupture, and already I was learning that such times, when all that was fixed is suddenly inchoate, are perhaps more real than any other: the passage of time inflicts itself in each ticking of the clock, the light is brighter, the outlines of objects painfully distinct. And mixed with fear and dismay lies an undeniable, glittering anticipation, a detached curiosity: something must happen that I cannot foresee; none will come, and evening, and tomorrow; that bridge from here to there must be built and must be crossed, and when I turn back from the other side, the very chasm will have closed up as if it had never been."

"I wanted, really, to write an essay about what it was like to be penned into a corner where every choice was wrong, where nobody would trust you and where the truth could not be told because it didn't exist. Camus knew it, and in my little way I knew it too. We all knew it, in my house, but we didn't talk about it."

"Words, meaningless though they might ring, as wrongly as we may interpret them, are the only missiles with which we are equipped, which we can lob across the uncharted terrain between our souls."

"I was asked why I had done it [jumped into a fountain at age four]. I announced—and it was true; I remember precisely the instant of teetering—that, aware I was going to fall willy-nilly, I had assumed my fate by making it my intention. What I actually said was simpler, of course: 'I was falling, so I jumped.' // Already at four, from somewhere, I had faith in intention—as if the fact that it had been willed altered the quality of my wetness, and the cold that ensued....And that, always, was the lesson of my family's stories....The implication was clear. Severance, departure, once mooted, must be seen as inevitable: that has always been my unquestioned belief. If choice is illusory, the aim must be to keep the illusion intact. With this corollary: there is no returning. We need the might-have-been because we know it will not ever be; the imaginary is our sustenance, but the real is where we live, a reality of fragments. We move the pieces when movement is possible, because possibility and necessity, on some plane, are one; because what is fated and what will be are inescapably the same, and the illusion our only choice, choice our illusion."

On death: "Even now, when I lock myself out of my apartment, and yet can see, in my mind, the exact position of my keys on the kitchen counter, ready to be snatched up—I cannot quite accept that those keys are inaccessible to me, that in the instant in which I slammed the door they became irretrievably, unsalvageable distant, on the other side, in the might-have-been, the ought-to-have-been; and it is only belatedly and with greater reluctance that I summon the super, or the locksmith—depending on the hour—admitting thereby that I cannot will the keys—and yet I see them, so exactly, and can feel their slippery coldness, their jagged runs—into my present pocket; that my error cannot be undone."

Loved it

This is a relatively long book at 400 pages, but I was sorry when it ended. The protagonist had become a sort of friend and I was sad to say good-bye to her.

Like The Emperor's Children, The Last Life created its distinct seductive mood, while still providing recognizable (and relatable) details of, in this case, the life of a teenage girl forced to think for herself. Though I enjoyed, and perhaps related more to, the satire of literary academia in The Emperor's Children, The Last Life was a deeper, and sweeter read.

Found this in a little free library and am completely floored by it. Such a crazy and intricate life story of a girl between the ages of 16-18, her family history, her place in it. A coming of age story that I’ve never seen told. Wonderful read.